The Ladies Senior Championship get underway this weekend with three teams looking to claim the title.

Over the last number of years, Kinawley have dominated ladies football in Fermanagh and they will be favourites to emerge victorious once again, although they will have to do it without last year's captain Joanne Doonan, who is now plying her trade in the AFLW with Essendon.

League fixtures will double up as qualifiers for the Senior Championship and first up will see Derrygonnelly Harps take on last year's Intermediate Champions, Enniskillen Gaels.

The Harps have been the closest challengers to Kinawley and pushed them all the way in last year's decider.

Looking ahead to the getting into championship action, their manager, Garry Smyth said: "The format is an unusual one with league games doubling as qualifiers for the senior championship final so it is difficult to know what sort of a bearing that will have on the dynamic of both competitions. As a club we are looking forward to getting back into action.

"Any time a club enters a competition you want to be involved at the business end and we are no different . Playing in Division One for a number of years now has helped our team develop and certainly if you are competing in recent County Finals that adds to the experience but this is a fresh season so it is all to play for again.

"The players have been applying themselves well in training and you can ask no more than that. It is also a boost to have our five county panellists back again."

The Harps quintet of Eimear Smyth, Brenda Bannon, Andrea Gordon, Kieran Elliott and Sarah Jane Jones will hope their inter-county experience will help them in their quest for the championship honours.

"The level to which we can perform at - we will have to wait and see. I know there is nothing going to be easy won when it comes to senior football in the County, particularly in the senior championship where we have Enniskillen who are the current Intermediate Champions and Kinawley who won the Ulster Intermediate title last year," Smyth concluded.

But Smyth does feel a frustration in how the season has been run this year: "As a consequence of the structure of the inter-county season set by Croke Park it is disappointing that meaningful club games are only getting underway now.

"With our club competitions having to be run off before the Ulster Club Championships commence in October it has left the fixtures’ committee in the County with a very difficult job as we have a very truncated club playing season.

"In the longer term the club scene will suffer with the absence of games which is contrary to what we should be trying to achieve. Hopefully that’s something that can be reviewed over the winter to avoid a similar situation arising in 2023."

Enniskillen Gaels manager Sean Murphy states that they are under no illusion about the size of the task facing them in the Senior Championship but he feels it will be a good experience for the youthful squad.

Enniskillen won the Intermediate Championship last year but they have lost a handful of players from that team and have turned to youth.

“We have lost the likes of Shauna Murphy, Emma Nolan, Kathryn Dane, Terri McCanny and Aoife Corrigan from the side that won the Intermediate last year and we have drafted in a lot of youth players.

We would hope that it will be a good experience for them to come against the two best teams in the county and it will show the girls the standard that is required to be playing at that level and we are under no illusion about where we stand in this competition,” he said.

The Gaels will look to the experience of the likes of Eimear Corrigan, Aoibheann Kelly, Kiah Collins and Danielle Collins while they can also call on Erin Tierney, who was part of the Fermanagh squad this season, and her minor and U16 colleagues.

“We will go out and try and do our best but we also recognise that we battled are way to the Intermediate title last season so this will be a step up. These games are also going to double up as league games so we can’t get too caught up on the championship, there are other games to be played as well in the league,” he said.